In choosing his new attorney general, President Bush departed Monday from one of his more unshakable core values: the known commodity.

Instead the White House, seeking consensus over confrontation, tapped former New York federal judge Michael Mukasey to helm the troubled Justice Department.

Mukasey, 66, would take over an agency that's seen an exodus of top officials and faces multiple internal and external investigations -- including one by the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose chairman, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), signaled he might delay confirmation hearings on Mukasey until the White House answers questions about its role in the firings of federal prosecutors.

Still, as an outsider to Washington political and legal circles, Mukasey arrives with a reputation of being bullish on national security but relatively independent of politics, with almost no ties to the Bush administration.

In other words, it's a different page than the one typically found in the Bush playbook -- a change Democrats welcomed, with some going as far as to hope it was the beginning of a new day in this, the seventh year of the president's administration.

"This selection has meaning beyond the resume of the man selected," said Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.).

Schumer was an early advocate for Mukasey when his name was floated by administration officials late last week. The support of the pugnacious New York Democrat was enough, some joked, to doom Mukasey's chances before he was seriously considered.

Bush breaks with his trend

Once, that may have been true. The president has made a habit of relying on those he trusts over strangers, whether it was appointing Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, trying to put Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court or turning to Alberto Gonzales, the man Mukasey is nominated to replace, as attorney general.

But there are signs that this time, the White House has other things on its mind (Iraq and the economy being just two) and is not spoiling for a fight.

Last week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) made clear that an earlier possibility, former Solicitor General Theodore Olson, would not make it out of the starting gate. That pushed the White House in the direction of Mukasey.

Olson, who helped lead Bush's legal fight during the 2000 election recount, would have been a comfort-zone candidate for Bush. And perhaps more important to the White House, Olson could be trusted to preserve a hard line on administration policy regarding the war on terror and investigations on Capitol Hill.

Reagan appointee in 1987

Where Mukasey stands on those issues is harder to say. He was appointed to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan in 1987 and recently returned to private practice with a prestigious New York firm.

In the 1990s, Mukasey presided over some of the highest-profile terrorism trials of the day, including the prosecution of Omar Abdel-Rahman, whom he sentenced to life in prison for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Mukasey also handled one of the early cases involving Jose Padilla, who was convicted of conspiracy charges last month. Mukasey ruled the government could hold Padilla indefinitely as an enemy combatant but said he was entitled to legal counsel, essentially giving both sides something in the debate over the place of civil liberties in the war on terror.

He has supported the USA Patriot Act, which critics say infringes on civil liberties. Viet Dinh, a former Justice Department official who co-wrote the act, said he attended a forum in which Mukasey offered a spirited defense of the anti-terror law. "It wasn't just an analysis [of the act]," Dinh said. "He had the courage to speak up."

Yet others who know Mukasey say it's unlikely he will be perceived as too cozy with the administration, a charge frequently leveled at Gonzales. Mukasey, they say, is a product of the tightknit community of federal prosecutors and judges in the Southern District of New York, where distance from Washington is a point of pride.

"It's in the water," said Mary Jo White, a former U.S. attorney in New York who oversaw the prosecution of Abdel-Rahman.

Two products of that community are Patrick Fitzgerald, the Chicago U.S. attorney, and James Comey, a former deputy attorney general who now works at Lockheed Martin. Both served as federal prosecutors in Manhattan. Both later battled the Bush administration, with Fitzgerald prosecuting former White House aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby and Comey opposing then-White House counsel Gonzales over the legality of the domestic eavesdropping program.